These data science job ads, referenced in our data science book, were posted on AnalyticTalent in December 2013. We provide them for illustration purposes only. It is very interesting to contrast them with resumes from smart qualified candidates listed in our book: the contrast is spectacular; some of these companies are looking for the non-existent unicorn, master of all skills, but few companies offer perks such as telecommuting to attract such individuals.

Job Ad #1: Data Scientist - NPR (Washington, DC)

Overview:

A thriving, mission-driven multimedia organization, NPR produces award-winning news, information, and music programming in partnership with hundreds of independent public radio stations across the nation. NPR listeners value information, creativity, curiosity, and social responsibility – our employees do too. We are innovators and leaders in diverse fields, from journalism and digital media to IT and development. Every day, our employees and member stations touch the lives of millions worldwide.

Role Summary 

Do you have a passion for analytics and thirst to apply your knowledge to media?  Do you want to be challenged by your job and be surrounded by passionate, dedicated, and creative people?  Then this role is for you. You will extract insights from complex media usage data sets for product development, evaluate, and identify strategic opportunities. You will become the expert for digital metrics within NPR.  You have a unique blend of thoughtful data-driven curiosity and pragmatism, and clearly know the difference between game-changing ideas and time sucking activities.

Essential Duties Include:

• Master the data flowing through NPR and determine all parameters for analysis
• Create information strategy for cross-platform analytics
• Assure data quality and integrity for NPR’s digital metrics systems
• Actively troubleshoot data issues and collaborate with developers and vendors to resolve data issues and upgrade systems
• Create meaningful dashboards for executives, content leaders and digital newsroom staff, including historical reporting
• Mentor junior researchers and train colleagues in analytic techniques
• Independently perform data mining techniques and statistical analyses on large data sets to uncover critical patterns and predictive models
• Collaborate with U/X and product team to implement user testing and A/B experiments
• Develop metrics to measure business performance
• Build models to understand media behavior online to discover actionable insights
• Communicates on small teams, formal presentations and at business unit events
• Develop written communications to address varied styles and information needs
• Assess existing systems and recommend enhancements
• Build strong working relationships at all levels with clients and build problem-solving partnerships with clients and colleagues

Requirements

Education: A degree in computer science, statistics, econometrics, mathematics or information science or related field; preference given to candidates with advanced degree.

Required Skills:

• 5 years of experience in data mining and media or advertising analytics
• Proficient in at least two programming/scripting languages: Python, Ruby, Pig, Java, Hive, PHP, JS
• Specific experience using tools such as Mahout, Hadoop, Cassandra, Splunk
• Hands on knowledge of database manipulation through environments such as MySQL, NoSQL
• Experience working with Linux/Unix platform
• Facile with statistical computing using R, SAS, SPSS, or S-Plus
• Skilled in K-Means and K-means clustering, MapReduce
• Ability to decompose a problem and work through a technical approach and attack a problem in a systematic way
• Solid experience with machine learning and data mining
• Experience with digital metrics systems such as Adobe Site Catalyst or Google Analytics Premium
• Experience with Google Analytics API
• Strong analysis and experimental design skills with a keen sense for data gaps and inconsistencies
• Experience in developing data visualization independently or with tools such as Tableau
• Excellent oral, written and visual communication skills, particularly at explaining complex quantitative information to non-technical audiences
• Strong collaboration skills
• Not just a tolerance but a zeal for multitasking.  At the same time show a clear sense for priorities and commitment to follow-through
• Experience managing data-driven research from project inception to client communication
• Ability to work independently with little supervision as well as in collaborative team environment
• Self-starter with the ability to work in a constantly-changing environment

 

Job Ad #2: Data Scientist - Information Security Specialist at Visa

Staff Software Engineer  (Bellevue, Washington)

CyberSource, a Visa company, is a global leader in e-Commerce Payment Management. As part of CyberSource’s continued growth and expansion we are looking for talented, articulate and bright individuals who want to make a difference. CyberSource has been and continues to be a pioneer within the e-Commerce Payment Management world.

CyberSource offers a full-service payment management platform for e-commerce merchants, combining global payment processing, fraud management and payment security systems.

Position Summary

This position is for a Staff Software Engineer who will architect, design, build and test the next generation of web applications for Cybersource’s enterprise and small business platforms. This highly visible and mission critical position will require design and implementation of solutions that will enable CyberSource to meet and exceed industry standards. As a staff engineer of the team, he/she will need to communicate technical ideas clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences and will also be responsible for designing solutions and helping team members with the implementation. Mentoring and guiding the development team will be one of the primary objectives.

Position Details

• Architect technical solutions given complex business requirements and problems.
• Design and Develop highly secure, scalable and fault-tolerant systems using J2EE or Spring Stack
• Design and develop various reusable business components and API interfaces for merchants/resellers.
• Build UI that works on mobile, tablet and desktop browsers and mixed mode apps, using Responsive Web Design techniques using HTML5, CSS, JQuery or other JavaScript frameworks.
• Follow Engineering Excellence practices of unit testing, TDD (Test Driven Design), separation of concerns and other best design practices to build reusable and maintainable components.
• Design and develop reusable, scalable and secure stored procedures using T-SQL/PL-SQL/ MySql
• Design data flow models and work with legacy database systems.
• Work with cross functional team to resolve various project impediments.
• Mentor and help guide the team to achieve technical and business goals.
• Propose improvements to existing systems and provide prototypes as needed.

Requirements

• MS in Computer Science or equivalent
• 8+ years’ experience designing and developing JVM-based applications and spring based web applications using MVC architecture.
• Expertise in writing web services and developing server side components using Spring/J2EE technologies.
• Solid understanding of Service Oriented Architectures, Object Oriented Programming Concepts, Commonly used design patterns and web service concepts like REST and SOAP.
• Expertise in using JPA technology like Hibernate or other ORM technologies.
• Expertise in using SpringTC/TOMCAT/JBOSS/WEBLOGIC servers with Spring to develop web applications.
• 5+ years of experience writing production quality SQL/stored procedures.
• Experience in relational database design, optimization and performance with commercial-grade databases such as SQL Server, Sybase, Oracle, or MySql.
• Experience with Agile methodologies/SCRUM
• Experience in client side JavaScript frameworks, especially AngularJS is a plus.
• Excellent written and communication skills and leadership potential.
• Experience in working with .Net technologies is a plus especially C#, Asp.Net and WCF.

 

Job Ad #3: Data Scientist - Machine Zone (Palo Alto, California)

As a member of the data science team, you will develop and investigate hypotheses, structure experiments and build mathematical models to identify game optimization points that will encourage users to play our games more often, over longer periods of time, resulting in higher lifetime values. We are looking for a sharp, disciplined, and highly quantitative individual who has a passion for mobile gaming, data mining and mathematical modeling. We are building a unique technology platform dedicated to the operation and real time optimization of free to play games. This is your chance to be part of gaming history!

Responsibilities:

• Build mathematical models and automated machine learning tools to analyze and optimize all aspects of MZ games, providing actionable insights in real time
• Design and implement statistical tests in the game to verify the models
• Collaborate with data warehouse engineers on data selection, preprocessing and formatting for analysis
• Influence development teams (platform and games) to implement tools, features and/or designs – success is measured in % monetizing, retention, time spent in the game, and LTV

Requirements:

• B.S. or higher in Applied Math, Statistics, Computer Science, or related field
• 3+ years’ experience in monetization and retention analytics in ecommerce, social media or consumer products a plus, specific experience with social games or mobile apps strongly preferred
• Strong background in statistical or mathematical modeling
• Strong analytical and quantitative problem solving ability
• Solid understanding of statistical modeling / predictive analysis/ machine learning / data mining / recommender system concepts
• Expert with R, MATLAB, SAS or equivalent
• Good presentation and communication skills
• Ability to prioritize and track multiple projects in parallel

Desirable:

• Scripting experience in Python, Ruby, or Javascript
• Experience on Unix/Linux OS
• Experience of Hadoop, Hive and Map/Reduce programing
• Other degrees in economics or behavioral sciences

Top Reasons to Join Us:

• Be part of the most innovative mobile gaming company with phenomenal growth opportunities
• Competitive compensation package, bonus initiative plans, 401K, full health benefits, ST/LT insurance and unlimited vacation
• Located in downtown Palo Alto near all the restaurants, bars, and cafes
• Food, snacks, drinks, and lunches/dinners with founders
• Monthly events (offsite mixers, game nights, ice cream socials, etc.), group lunches, holiday party, ping pong table, video games… and more!

About Us:

Based in Palo Alto, Calif., Machine Zone, Inc. (formerly known as Addmired, Inc.) is focused on creating the most engaging free-to-play mobile social games in the world. Launched in 2008 with Y Combinator, Machine Zone has seen explosive annual growth with its highly successful free-to-play games, including Game of War: Fire Age, iMob 2, Original Gangstaz, Global War, Race or Die 2, among others. To date, the company has well over 40 million downloads of their iPhone games and is the recipient of the 2010 Crunchies Award (Techcrunch) for Best Bootstrapped Startup. Machine Zone operates profitably and has raised two rounds of funding from Anthos Capital, Baseline Ventures and Menlo Ventures.

 

Job Ad #4: Head of Predictive Modeling and Advanced Analytics (San Francisco)

As a global leader in 3D design, engineering, and entertainment software, Autodesk helps people imagine, design, and create a better world. Autodesk accelerates better design through an unparalleled depth of experience and a broad portfolio of software to give customers the power to solve their design, business, and environmental challenges. In addition to designers, architects, engineers, and media and entertainment professionals, Autodesk helps students, educators, and casual creators unlock their creative ideas through user-friendly applications.

Job Title and Number: Head of Predictive Modeling and Advanced Analytics, Req# 13WD14224 Location: San Francisco or Singapore

General Summary

The Market Intelligence Group is chartered with helping to create an ever more data-driven marketing organization by providing actionable analytical insights into our competition, markets, partners and customers to support key business decisions at the global, regional and business unit levels.

Autodesk’s marketing organization is engaged in a significant transformation effort aimed at fostering long lasting relationship with our customers and prospects through more nurture based marketing activities delivering the right message to the right person at the right time.

The Market Intelligence group is looking for an outstanding leader to hire and develop a newly formed team of top notch data scientists. The group is tasked to design, develop, and field data mining solutions that have direct and measurable impact on Autodesk Marketing effectiveness. The role requires both a broad knowledge of existing data mining algorithms and creativity to invent and customize when necessary as well as experience in creating a team from the ground up and developing a new practice area with strong ties with the business. The job is located in San Francisco, CA or Singapore. This is an outstanding opportunity for a dynamic and creative leader that wants to make a difference and help transform the company.

Through the usage of state of the art marketing Automation platforms and in-product data collection mechanisms, Autodesk has a tremendous amount of data, and we have just scratched the surface in pattern detection, predictive modeling, and optimization. There are many exciting problems to be discovered and solved and many business owners eager to leverage data mining. The Market Intelligence team encourages scientists to stay abreast of data mining research by attending conferences and working with academic faculty and students. We foster a collaborative work environment, but allow solution autonomy on projects. Work environment includes Hadoop based data warehouse and SAS / SPSS or R predictive modeling application.

The role will be focused on managing the team tasked to deliver statistical models aimed at increasing the effectiveness of Autodesk marketing activities and campaigns. In particular this manager will be responsible for:

• Build statistical models (both predictive and descriptive) for Campaign targeting prioritization, Nurture stream design and optimization, Response management prioritization, Analytics lead scoring, Account modeling, customer value migration, cross sell, churn or any other models meeting a specific business need
• Develop the organization’s understanding of the business impact and usage of advanced modeling techniques
• Serving as methodology “guru” across Marketing to identify and implement statistical models, techniques, tools and methodologies that improve our efficiency and effectiveness
• Work with the key business stakeholders (marketing, sales, channel, etc.) in understanding customer analysis needs and ensuring key requirements and objectives are addressed and achieved
• Contributing to the development of the market intelligence methodologies including data set requirements & specifications.
• Conduct data sourcing and integration and build predictive models to analyze customer purchase value, propensity and behavior.
• Analyze install base to identify migration, up sell and cross sell opportunities.
• Provide required support to operations and IT organizations to implement predictive models in operational systems (Marketing Automation platform, In product messaging platform, Universal Customer Profile platform…)

Requirements:

• Undergraduate degree and above in Statistics, Computer Science, Information Engineering or a related field.
• 8-10 years’ experience in data mining, customer analytics, or big data analytics in a well-known firm and/ or an equivalent position in a major High Tech industry player.
• Familiar with data mining technology: regression, segmentation, association, decision tree, time series, neural network, association modeling, clustering, text mining, hypothesis testing - being able to develop hypotheses and test them with careful multivariate experiments and big data analytics.
• Strong knowledge of SAS Base, SAS-STAT, SPSS, R, Mathlab and SQL , Hadoop / Hive / map reduced query skills
• Open and creative mind-set.
• Excellent communication, writing skills and presentation skills.
• Experience hiring in the field with strong network and with ability to attract top talents
• Team management experience including remote members
• Willingness to adapt to flexible working hours necessary for a global role

Autodesk provides one of the most exceptional compensation and benefit packages, including 401k matching, six-week sabbatical after four years of employment, domestic partner policy, ongoing employee training and development, flexible work hours and more!

If you are an extraordinary person who strives for excellence, please submit your resume online at http://www.autodesk.com/careers - Job Req #13WD14224. Autodesk is proud to be an equal opportunity employer that is committed to a diverse workforce.

Autodesk was named one of FORTUNE Magazine's "100 Best Companies to Work For" in 2013

 

Job Ad #5: Data Scientist, TwitterTV (Boston)

 

At Twitter, our mission is to instantly connect users to the information most meaningful to them. Realizing this mission involves work in areas such as recommendation systems, information retrieval systems, large graph analysis, machine learning, spam, etc. We are looking for machine learning experts to work on exciting algorithmic as well as deep infrastructure issues, all at a really big scale.

Although you will work on cutting-edge problems, this position is not a research position. You will participate in the engineering life-cycle at Twitter, including designing distributed systems, writing production code, conducting code reviews and working alongside our infrastructure and reliability teams. You will be equally comfortable doing incremental quality work and also building brand new systems to enable future quality improvements.

Responsibilities

• Apply data-mining, machine learning and/or graph analysis techniques for a variety of modeling and relevance problems involving users, their relationships, their tweets and their interests.
• Design and evaluate novel approaches for handling high-volume real-time data streams.
• Code using primarily Java, Scala, and scripting languages such as Python or Ruby.
• Conduct design and code reviews.
• Interface with analytics, product management, and operations teams.
• Work with large unstructured and structured data sets (multi-terabyte+, 100MM+ daily transaction volumes).

Requirements

• Extensive experience programming in at least one of the following: Java, Scala, C/C++
• Knowledge of a scripting language, e.g. Ruby or Python
• B.S., M.S. or Ph.D. in Computer Science or equivalent work experience
• Knowledge of one or more of the following: machine-learning, information retrieval, recommendation systems, social network analysis
• Familiarity operating Linux-based systems

Desired

• Experience with Hadoop, Pig or other MapReduce-based architectures
• Active user of Twitter

 

Job Ad #6:  Econometrics Data Scientist - Adobe Research (San Jose)

 

Adobe believes in hiring the very best. We are known for our vibrant, dynamic and rewarding workplace where personal and professional fulfillment and company success go hand in hand. We take pride in creating exceptional work experiences, encouraging innovation and being involved with our employees, customers and communities. We invite you to discover what makes Adobe a place where you can do and be your best.

Position Summary

The Systems Technologies Lab is part of the Imagination Lab within Adobe Research - a team of world-class researchers in machine learning, data mining, econometrics and social networking. Beyond Adobe's traditional strengths in media technologies, this team is focused on research opportunities in areas related to digital marketing and media optimization (e.g., Adobe's Digital Marketing Cloud). This researcher position will focus on discovering innovative approaches to leveraging advanced statistical and econometric modeling techniques to perform marketing mix modeling research on multiple massive datasets. Additionally, this researcher will identify key measures, approaches and methodologies for measuring traditional and digital (online, interactive) marketing campaign success against business objectives.

Adobe has been a pioneer and innovator throughout its history and is recognized as one of the Top 100 Best Global Brands according to Interbrand. Adobe’s dynamic working environment is also well known and has received awards throughout the globe. Recognizing that employees are at the core of our success, Adobe recruits and retains highly qualified and motivated individuals, creates an environment where they can innovate and achieve their best, and rewards them for their performance by giving them an opportunity to share in the company’s success.

Responsibilities

• Perform marketing mix modeling research projects leveraging advanced statistical techniques including econometric modeling.
• Identify key measures, approach and methodologies measuring traditional and digital (online, interactive) marketing campaign success against business objectives.
• Design and evaluate measurement systems for data capture and reporting, including assessment, identification, and implementation of data sources and tracking requirements.
• Perform data analysis research to identify the key touch points/factors that drive predictive consumer behavior and make recommendations that will drive strategy
• Use knowledge of advertising and marketing to deliver critical analyses including: campaign effectiveness analysis, customer segmentation and profiling, retention analysis, lifetime value analysis, and competitive market research
• Work with development teams throughout their product lifecycle.

Requirements

• PhD in Statistics, Economics, Econometrics or Computer Science and 3 years of experience. MS/BS in Computer Science.
• Ideal candidate would have solid background in a quantitative field, with demonstrated experience constructing and evaluating large data sets for analysis.
• Experience with statistics, econometrics, and machine learning is essential.
• Strong publication history within the academic community
• Experience with digital media measurement tools including third party ad serving, syndicated research and web analytics, such as Netratings, Comscore, Doubleclick, Atlas, Adobe/Omniture, Coremetrics, Webtrends etc. is required
• Knowledge of modeling software (MATLAB, R, SAS, SPSS) database tools (SQL, MS Access, Excel PivotTables, MS Sql Server) and enterprise business intelligence tools such as Cognos or Business Objects or Tableau
• Comfort analyzing large data sets